“Human trafficking—the commercial sexual exploitation of American children and women, via the Internet, strip clubs, escort services, or street prostitution—is on its way to becoming one of the worst crimes in the U.S.,” said prosecutor Krishna Patel.

In order to avoid detection (in some cases aided and abetted by the police) and cater to male buyers’ demand for sex with different women, pimps and the gangs and crime syndicates they work for have turned sex trafficking into a highly mobile enterprise, with trafficked girls, boys and women constantly being moved from city to city, state to state, and country to country.

For instance, the Baltimore-Washington area, referred to as The Circuit, with its I-95 corridor dotted with rest stops, bus stations and truck stops, is a hub for the sex trade.

The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out, “Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.“

“For every 10 women rescued, there are 50 to 100 more women who are brought in by the traffickers. Unfortunately, they’re not 18- or 20-year-olds anymore,” noted a 25-year-old victim of trafficking. “They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked. They’re little girls.”

Where did this appetite for young girls come from?

Look around you.

Young girls have been sexualized for years now in music videos, on billboards, in television ads, and in clothing stores. Marketers have created a demand for young flesh and a ready supply of over-sexualized children.

“All it takes is one look at [certain social media] photos of teens to see examples—if they aren’t imitating porn they’ve actually seen, they’re imitating the porn-inspired images and poses they’ve absorbed elsewhere,” writes Jessica Bennett for Newsweek. “Latex, corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way into middle and high school.”

“In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives,” concludes Bennett. “Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.”

In other words, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators. And then we wonder why our young women are being preyed on, trafficked and abused?

Rarely do these girls enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.

Debbie, a straight-A student who belonged to a close-knit Air Force family living in Phoenix, Ariz., is an example of this trading of flesh. Debbie was 15 when she was snatched from her driveway by an acquaintance-friend. Forced into a car, Debbie was bound and taken to an unknown location, held at gunpoint and raped by multiple men. She was then crammed into a small dog kennel and forced to eat dog biscuits. Debbie’s captors advertised her services on Craigslist. Those who responded were often married with children, and the money that Debbie “earned” for sex was given to her kidnappers. The gang raping continued. After searching the apartment where Debbie was held captive, police finally found Debbie stuffed in a drawer under a bed. Her harrowing ordeal lasted for 40 days.

With a growing demand for sexual slavery and an endless supply of girls and women who can be targeted for abduction, this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon.

For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.

Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.

Peter Landesman paints the full horrors of life for those victims of the sex trade in his New York Times article “The Girls Next Door”:

Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners–toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens–as well as what she called a “damage group.” “In the damage group, they can hit you or do anything they want to,” she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it’s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.”

What Andrea described next shows just how depraved some portions of American society have become. “They’d get you hungry then to train you” to have oral sex. “They put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you had to learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open up better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy or scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older, I’d teach the younger kids how to float away so things didn’t hurt.”

Immigration and customs enforcement agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., report that when it comes to sex, the appetites of many Americans have now changed. What was once considered abnormal is now the norm. These agents are tracking a clear spike in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. As one agent noted, “We’ve become desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit.”

This trend is reflected by the treatment many of the girls receive at the hands of the drug traffickers and the men who purchase them. Peter Landesman interviewed Rosario, a Mexican woman who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years. She said: “In America, we had ‘special jobs.’ Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.”

Holly Austin Smith was abducted when she was 14 years old, raped, and then forced to prostitute herself. Her pimp, when brought to trial, was only made to serve a year in prison.

Barbara Amaya was repeatedly sold between traffickers, abused, shot, stabbed, raped, kidnapped, trafficked, beaten, and jailed all before she was 18 years old. “I had a quota that I was supposed to fill every night. And if I didn’t have that amount of money, I would get beat, thrown down the stairs. He beat me once with wire coat hangers, the kind you hang up clothes, he straightened it out and my whole back was bleeding.”

As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune: “In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”

One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.

This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.

Trafficked women and children are advertised on the internet, transported on the interstate, and bought and sold in swanky hotels.

Educate yourselves and your children about this growing menace in our communities.

Stop feeding the monster: Sex trafficking is part of a larger continuum in America that runs the gamut from homelessness, poverty, and self-esteem issues to sexualized television, the glorification of a pimp/ho culture—what is often referred to as the pornification of America—and a billion dollar sex industry built on the back of pornography, music, entertainment, etc.

Call on your city councils, elected officials and police departments to make the battle against sex trafficking a top priority, more so even than the so-called war on terror and drugs and the militarization of law enforcement.

Stop prosecuting adults for victimless “crimes” such as growing lettuce in their front yard and focus on putting away the pimps and buyers who victimize these young women.

Finally, the police need to do a better job of training, identifying and responding to these issues; communities and social services need to do a better job of protecting runaways, who are the primary targets of traffickers; legislators need to pass legislation aimed at prosecuting traffickers and “johns,” the buyers who drive the demand for sex slaves; and hotels need to stop enabling these traffickers, by providing them with rooms and cover for their dirty deeds.

That so many women and children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.

But the truth is that we are all guilty of contributing to this human suffering. The traffickers are guilty. The consumers are guilty. The corrupt law enforcement officials are guilty. The women’s groups who do nothing are guilty. The foreign peacekeepers and aid workers who contribute to the demand for sex slaves are guilty. Most of all, every individual who does not raise a hue and cry over the atrocities being committed against women and children in almost every nation around the globe—including the United States—is guilty.

“I have a tracker in me,”read the cryptic note, found in triage by a greenhorn doctor — scribbled by a woman in the emergency room.

She claimed to have been implanted with a GPS tracking device of some kind — an assertion not unheard of, but never the less unusual.

Dr. A, anonymous for safety concerns, rolled his eyes — ordinarily, such a note would be a sure indicator of mental illness, for which a psychiatrist would need to be summoned.

But this woman appeared lucid. Sane. Not at all paranoid or delusional.

And she had an incision.

So an x-ray was performed, and medical personnel gathered to view the results. But they stood breathless in disbelief — indeed, while they didn’t find a GPS tracker,

“Embedded in the right side of her flank is a small metallic object only a little bit larger than a grain of rice,” Dr. A recounted for Marketplace’s Dan Gorenstein. “But it’s there. It’s unequivocally there. She has a tracker in her. And no one was speaking for like five seconds — and in a busy ER that’s saying something.”

“It was a small glass capsule with a little almost like a circuit board inside of it,” the 28-year-old doctor.

Shock turned fast to concern when the doctors grasped what the presence of the object signaled about the 20-something woman’s life — and why she’d handed over the bizarre note.

“It’s an RFID chip. It’s used to tag cats and dogs, And someone had tagged her like an animal, like she was somebody’s pet that they owned.”

In fact, the unnamed woman had been treated as a pet — a possession — by her boyfriend, who sold her for sex and pocketed the money she brought back.

She was one of an innumerable amount of victims of human trafficking — a colossal problem in every corner of the globe, including the United States — where Dr. A has residency at a hospital in a ‘major American city,’ Marketplace discreetly noted.

That modern day slavery is alive and unfortunately booming, even in the U.S., might jar the somnambulant masses — after all, schools rightly cover the nation’s history of antebellum slavery quite thoroughly. But human trafficking and exploitation constitutes a modern iteration of baneful practice.

“Very plainly,” Katherine Chon, director of the newly created Office on Trafficking in Persons at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told Gorenstein, “human trafficking is when one person takes advantage of another person for some profit.”

Sex isn’t the only reason people buy other people — human trafficking sadly staffs a number of industries with forced laborers, from the menial and repetitive tasks of manufacturing, to domestic service.

Under threat of violent punishment — or worse — victims often endure horrific trauma and find it difficult, if not impossible, to alert others to their circumstances for assistance.

That’s where Dr. A and healthcare workers can step in — though law enforcement typically handles allegations of trafficking, observant medical staff might notice psychological and physical signs police would miss. Plus, spending even a brief time in private consultation with a doctor or nurse gives a victim the golden opportunity to speak up.

However, even the best training doesn’t prevent the majority of human trafficking victims from interacting normally — with the public none the wiser. Cagey perpetrators employ a number of tricks to keep from being caught — apparently including the implantation of tracking devices.

“I can guarantee you that I’ve placed my hands and I’ve examined and I’ve spoken to more trafficking victims than I know I have,” Massachusetts General Hospital emergency room doctor, Wendy Macias, told Gorenstein.

With so many victims slipping by unnoticed, the case of the woman with the tracking device should be ‘so disturbing,’ it sounds the alarm for everyone in the healthcare industry, Dr. Dale Carrison at the University Medical Center in Las Vegas explained.

“That was a big wake up call for me personally that ‘Uh-oh we’re going to another level now,’” he said. “And I need to get the word out to all my colleagues, don’t blow this off.”

RFID chips have long been theorized to be potential tools of a totalitarian State — essentially acting as a bar code would to track people’s every move. So disputatious are the devices, in fact, one Nevada lawmaker introduced a bill last month to ban mandatory implantation in humans of RFID chips — violators would be charged with a Class C felony for the alarming transgression.

That dystopian science fiction became reality in an x-ray sent chills down the traditionally-skeptical medical community’s backs.

“There’s so many sci-fi movies where they stick a device in somebody,” Dr. Carrison noted. “Well guess what? It’s real. It happened.”

One week ago, celebrity psychologist Dr. Phillip McGraw became one of the first individuals to expose the world of elite pedophilia on mainstream television. In a segment with a woman going by the name of “Kendall”, he and the rest of the world learned that she was literally born into – and grew up in – the world of elite sexual slavery.

Kendall explained that she was “born” to be a sex slave, as her parents intentionally had her to be ‘pimped’ by the trafficker she calls her “owner.” Since then, she has serviced some of the world’s most powerful and elite. In one instance, Kendall describes being passed around groups of rich and prominent men and women so they might “take turns” with her for sadistic sexual pleasure.

The information is damning, as the woman admits she was forced to rape children as young as 5-years-old. Additionally, she was forced by her “owner” to kill a baby. When asked when she was first raped, Kendall said it was “before I could talk – I was used to it by the time I was 2.”

Until recently, the theory that there is an elite pedophilia ring has been chalked up to being nothing more than a conspiracy theory. The segment which aired on mainstream media exposed the truth, however, which might be why Dutch company RTL pulled the plug on the Dr. Phil show which has aired since 2002.

A translated quote from Dutch Media RTL says the Dr. Phil show was canceled because of “difference choices in programming.” Because the show has been airing for almost 15 years and because the elite pedophilia ring was exposed last week, the timing is curious.

The Netherlands has come under fire in recent years for pedophile activity at the highest levels in society. According to English-speaking Dutch media NL Times, political leaders – including a mayor and justice official of the Netherlands – have been summoned to court by alleged victims of child sex-trafficking. Additionally, a Dutch pedophile society sought to challenge a Supreme Court ban on its organization in 2014, claiming the ban is a violation of their freedom of speech.

The elite pedophilia ring extends worldwide, which is why information concerning the matter needs to be exposed. While there is no evidence proving the Dr. Phil show was canceled by higher-up members of society in the Netherlands, the timing is questionable, nonetheless.